Creating the First Website for Your Business? Here’s What You Need to Know
Unless you’ve been living under the rock till now, it is useless to highlight how important a website is for a budding business. A website is a tool that enables your potential customers to either find you on Google or learn more about you after coming across with your other marketing material.
Alright, so you do understand the importance of having a website for your business, but how would you make a website? The question is particularly troubling when you are planning to create a website for the first time. Well, to your relief, creating a website for your business is not as difficult as you think it is. All you have to do is to take care of a few basic things that I will explain in the write-up that follows.
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Developer vs. Website Builder
Once you decide that you’re going to have a website for your business, the very next thing is to ask yourself if you want to do it yourself (with the help of an online website builder) or would hire a professional web developer for this job. Both of these options have their good points and bad, however, it greatly depends on your own situation or the things you’re aiming at.
In the case of getting your first website created, I usually recommend people to go for a good online website builder. There are a lot of website building platforms available on the Internet that give you a complete, state-of-the-art and professional-looking website in no time.
The other reason to recommend online website builders is that they are not as expensive as hiring a web developer, which is a good thing if you’re creating your first website which is often taken as an experiment.
You can also opt for a professional web developer to get this job done. Chances are that you’re going to get a website with more advanced features and highly aesthetic designs, but then again, you’ll find it a bit too costly, especially for a first-time endeavor into website creation.
Design
Cliché though it may sound, however, it is undeniable that website design plays an important role in attracting and retaining your potential customers, ultimately leading to promotion and sales. Website’s design is an amalgamation of layout, colors combinations, icons, imagery and a lot of other elements – and yes you have to take care of all of those things.
If you decide to opt for an online website builder, you will find a lot of options in web design through their Html5 website templates. You can choose from an array of such templates and can even get the flexibility of customization in any of these elements.
In the case of hiring a web developer, you can get not just a highly professional web design, but your design would be unique and exclusive to your website only. However, the freedom of customization will highly depend on the designer himself, meaning if he agrees to make all the changes you want to your website time and again.
Content Management
Content management, meaning the ability to regularly upload and modify both textual and graphical content on your website, is one of the key things to look for if someone is making his first website. It doesn’t matter which type of business you run, the website does need regular updating in terms of content i.e. pricing, discount offers, new arrivals or features, general information or just about anything.
The content of a website is usually managed through a CMS or Content Management System. Either you create the website on your own through a website builder, or get it done by a web developer, in both cases, there is a number of CMS you can choose from.
The most commonly used CMS are WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Magento, and Typo3 etc. All of them have their own features, however, my recommendation would be to go for WordPress, that is the simplest, yet the most feature-filled CMS nowadays. 22.5 % of all websites on the Internet are based on WordPress which makes it the most popular and easy to use CMS among the rest.
Responsive and SEO Optimized
Being responsive means that your website can easily adapt itself to any screen, let it be a desktop, laptop (or any screen resolution), tablet or a mobile phone. In this era of multiple devices, it is very important for your website to be able to present itself nicely on any device it is opened in.
SEO or Search Engine Optimized website means that your website appears in the search results of famous search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo etc. Only an efficiently SEO optimized website will appear in the search results of your potential customers who would use certain keywords to look up what they want.
Here too, I would recommend you to consider an online website builder, because most of them help you create a website that is highly responsive and search engine optimized. Especially in the case of your first website that would not be needing a very high level of responsiveness and optimization that a web developer will provide, however with a high price tag.
In conclusion
Creating your first website on your own with the help of a website builder or hiring a web developer’s services for that, depends on your budget, requirements and your ultimate goals. However, which mode you chose, the points I’ve mentioned above may help you get an idea of what you want and what to look for in your very first website.
